I AM A FLY called Gilbert and I live by a pond, a stagnant pond in a bird sanctuary. The surface of the pond is covered by a carpet of tiny bright green organic discs. The reeds and the rushes still thrust up from the muddy bed below, and as the breeze plays over the water the leafy tendrils of a weeping willow on the bank stir gently. Climb the bank and you will find, set back in the trees, a tumbledown shed. This is where the E(ROT)IC POTATO is.
One day I flew up the bank where the shadows hang and the ivy claws at the gray stones edging flatly out of the irradiated earth. Forms of other insects flashed by me. I settled upon a branch and turned my compound eyes toward the shed which housed the E(ROT)IC POTATO. It lay beneath the trees, and though its windows were smashed and boarded up with cardboard, its roof was whole. The white paint was peeling off the boards, and the door was held closed by a rusty nail. One hinge hung loose. The sharp tap of a bird’s beak rattled suddenly through the air. A butterfly emerged from between the cardboard and the shattered windowpane. A rusting tool, half in sunlight and half in shadow, was leaned against the wall beside the shaky door. I did not go further. I knew I would be turned back. I was not yet ready to enter the presence of the E(ROT)IC POTATO. The emergent butterfly drifted by me in the dappled woodland sunlight, and I returned to the pond.
On the way I found a fairly large crowd of insects gathered round a poisoned water rat, and the air was abuzz with the vibrations of fine wings and the chatter of excited voices. The creature lay on the bank shivering, for its pelt had lost the sleek oily texture that insulated the mammal within. After a few feeble attempts to haul its body up the bank it collapsed limply and lay panting, near death, in the mud. A yellow fluid seeped thickly from its ears and eyes, and a greenish discoloration spread across its soft underbelly. As the breathing grew heavier, the mouth opened and sucked air and we saw that its teeth had crumbled to impotent stumps. A rat without teeth was doomed, in our world.
Several flies and some ants had already mounted the body and were sampling tissue. They quickly discovered that the irradiation was mild, and once again we were confronted by proof of our biological superiority: that rat couldn’t breathe our air and live. A warm pulse ran through the crowd, and then we set to.
There was more than enough for all, but naturally we wanted to lay open the belly first and get at the inner organs. The biters and chewers were quickly ushered to the front, and went to work. The rest of us buzzed about, making inroads where we could. I was set to breaking down blockage in the left ear, to clear a passage to the brain.
Some time later word spread that the ants had got through, and we buzzed down to have a look. Ariadne the dragonfly had been flitting about the head for a while, and flew close to me on the short hop to the opened belly. I was thrilled by her proximity, and though our eyes did not meet I knew she was aware of me.
There was a buzzy crunch on the belly of the water rat, and in all the confusion of eager mandibles and flashing wings my body drew very close to Ariadne’s. I felt a tremor run through her as my proboscis glanced against her articulated thorax, and then something rather wonderful happened. Ariadne fluttered aloft and, hovering close, delicately displayed the milk white tip of her ovipositor to me. I was flooded by an irresistible genetic impulse to penetrate and fertilize her, but the trembling organ was withdrawn and the flashing blue-green dragonfly fluttered away.
Then, before my reeling senses could recover, they were again bombarded, this time by a meaty waft of warm fresh mammalian intestine. At that point I lost control completely and plunged into the innards of the rat’s body with my fellows and fed.
• • •
The meal continued as the sun moved across an intensely brown sky. In the late afternoon, when the pond lay in shadow and nothing stirred the reeds, and the dripping tendrils of the weeping willow ululated imperceptibly and the tranquility was broken only by the endless declamations of the throstle-throated birds, and the countless tiny bright green organic discs had silently meshed to form an unbroken slimy weave over the poisoned water, the crab arrived.
‘My turn, I think,’ he murmured as he eased his great plated frame sideways up the bank. There was a din of protest at this, but the crustacean could not have cared less for the shrill outrage of a fly. He thrust a massive claw into the cadaver; and then, in full view of the assembled insects, he scooped out and consumed a dripping, glistening mountain of our eggs! The uproar intensified, but with utter indifference the hoary old scavenger shuffled his cantankerous and exoskeletal self entirely inside the rat’s body, and within a few moments a steady, muffled grumble, basso profundo, was all that could be heard. He emerged, some time later, eructating, and made his way sideways back to the pond.
• • •
That night Ariadne admitted me to the E(ROT)IC POTATO. In a darkness strangely alive we flew from the body of the dead rat up the bank and through the trees to the shed. A full moon, tinted with toxins to the color of a rotting orange, bathed our rickety little temple in the febrile glow of post-apocalyptic romance. Ariadne’s articulated rear segment trailed through the moonbeams and I flew steadily in her wake, inhaling drunkenly the subtle wisplets of insect love juice she was secreting. She landed with grace upon the edge of the windowframe and I came down beside her a moment later, swooning foolishly, barely conscious.
There were wasps everywhere. They swarmed about the shattered windowframe and squeezed themselves between the shards and the cardboard in the moonlight. Ariadne, her long smooth gauzy wings folded perpendicular above herself, twitched her slender tail sharply as one of these guardians approached us. I knew enough to let her do the talking.
‘Good evening,’ said the wasp smoothly.
Ariadne, rubbing her gossamer wings one against the other and filling the air with a silky rustle that excited me beyond words, graced the handsome big stinger with a dazzling multifaceted glance.
‘Ariadne,’ said the wasp, with pleasure. ‘And – a small fly?’ I blew out my bulbous thorax, somewhat pricked by his tone.
‘Roger, isn’t it?’ murmured Ariadne, and as the wasp inclined his head with slight irony, she went on briskly, ‘Yes, I shall be taking him in with me.’
Then she rose into the air and hovered there, flicking her tail. ‘No problem, is there, Roger?’ she breathed, glancing down at the wasp.
‘None at all,’ he said, and with a small smile playing about his segmented lower mouthpart, he ushered her through the broken windowpane. I prepared to follow.
Out late, little fly,’ remarked the wasp. ‘Fancied a bit of dragonfly, did we?’
The way he pronounced the word dragonfly left me in no doubt as to his meaning. It was a scurrilous imputation – so I buzzed him.
‘Brat!’ hissed the enraged yellow jacket, his sting-charged rear end whipping upward like a scorpion’s. I zipped at high speed through the laser-thin gap between the shards and the cardboard and swept abuzzing into the temple of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
And was immediately stopped short in my trajectory by the sheer majesty of the spectacle that lay before me. Ariadne hovered near a moonlit rafter and, wordlessly stupefied, thrilled beyond language, I joined her. Together we gazed down from the high regions of its cathedral upon the splendor of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
It was a dead man lying on his back under a table, with one hand on his breast and the other on a book on the floor. His chest had caved in and the hand itself had flopped limply into the cavity where once had been the heart. The heart itself, of course, was long since devoured.
And the man’s eyes and ears and mouth and belly were alive with insects! And the space between his body and the table was filled with flying insects! And their sounds were amplified by the gabled roof and filled the gloomy chamber like the very drone of Eternity itself! And that vast booming buzzing harmony was a sonic articulation of the Triumph of the Insectile Will!
‘Come, Gilbert,’ whispered Ariadne, and I followed her through the shafts of orange moonlight and descended with reverence deep into the bowels of the E(ROT)IC POTATO. There, in the darkness, I observed once again the milk white miracle of her ovipositor; but this time the organ was not withdrawn.
And then every dawning genetic tremor I had ever felt was finally fulfilled, not once, not twice, but a thousand times! A million times! A thousand million times! I quivered to the very quick of my being; I surrendered, fragmented, melted in the molten intolerable pleasure of it and dissolved to pure nonbeing. wrapped in shattering slithering Ariadne and sinking deeper and ever-deeper into the glow and pulse of the degenerating intestine of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
• • •
Later, still intoxicated, I lurched out, creamed and filmed with the eggy juices of insect love, and crawled away to lick my wings. The dull buzz of Eternity roared warmly through my drained and sated body, and I knew I was changed forever. As the moon sank to the horizon and the first brown rays of a new day probed the eastern sky, I knew I had finally become a fly.